Elly Griffiths: A Room Full Of Bones

Ruth likes Sandra but never knows what to say to her, so she thanks her, picks up Kate – floury hands on her best jacket – and backs out of the small terraced house. Sandra waves her goodbye, a child on each hip.

‘She hasn’t slept, kept going all afternoon, so you might be lucky tonight,’ she says.

There was a time when Ruth wouldn’t have understood this sentence. She is wiser now. Kate hasn’t slept. This means that if Ruth keeps her awake all the way home, she may fall asleep at six and not wake until the morning. Kate and Ruth still haven’t really got the sleeping thing sorted. Get her into a routine, the books say, but the only bedtime routine that suits her daughter is Ruth staying with her for hours, reading stories, singing lullabies, or just lying there holding her hand. If Ruth tiptoes out of the room, Kate starts to wail. Let her cry, say the books, but Ruth can’t bear to. Maybe it would be better if there was another parent, someone to pour her a glass of wine and tell her to be strong, but on her own Ruth weakens. Before she has got downstairs, she’s back in attendance, singing, story-telling, hand-holding. She usually falls asleep too, lying beside Kate’s cot, and wakes up stiff and dry-mouthed at midnight. When morning comes, horrifyingly early, one of them is bright-eyed and raring to go and it isn’t Ruth.

‘Mum,’ says Kate now. ‘Mum mum mum mum.’

This is a new development, one which never fails to bring a lump to Ruth’s throat. She likes the way that Kate says ‘Mum’ and not ‘Mummy’, as if she’s a tiny teenager. Ruth’s more comfortable with mum anyway. Mummy sounds twee and home counties. She’s sure that Shula and David Archer call their mother ‘Mummy’.

Slightly more disturbingly, Kate has also started saying ‘Dada.’ As there’s no male person currently standing in this relation to her, she employs a scatter-gun approach and has so far bestowed the title on Ruth’s cat, Flint, her grandfather, Cathbad, and the postman. Ruth’s father and Cathbad were delighted; Flint and the postman under-whelmed.

As she drives through the King’s Lynn streets, past the quay and the customs house and the market square, Ruth keeps up a merry flow of prattle designed to keep her daughter awake. ‘Look Kate, look at that dog! He’s spotty isn’t he? Just like the hundred-and-one Dalmatians. Mum will read you that one day. It’s brilliant. Much better than the film. Look, children dressed as witches! And some more of them! And here are some children dressed as mass-murderers. How cute!’ As afternoon turns to evening, more and more of these mini-devils swarm onto the streets. When did trick-and-treating become so ubiquitous? She’s never going to let Kate do it. But then, there are no neighbours where they live, only the sea and the miles of whispering marshland. Perhaps she should move. Ruth winds down the windows, hoping that the cold will keep Kate awake. She ejects Bruce Springsteen and puts in a tape of children’s songs. ‘My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea.’ All in vain. Kate’s head droops.

Ruth’s not too disappointed. She knows she’ll pay for it later but right now she could do with the quiet. Maybe Kate will stay asleep when they get home and Ruth can carry her up to her cot. Mum needs to think, Ruth tells Kate silently. She’s a bit churned up because she saw your dad today. Dad. Kate has never called Nelson ‘Dada’ but then she hasn’t seen him for six months. In the first few months of Kate’s life, Nelson was a frequent visitor, torn with guilt over Michelle but also fascinated by this new, unexpected daughter. Kate was born after Ruth and Nelson spent one night together, a few hours stolen out of a horrendous sequence of events which had begun with a murdered child. Ruth had always known that Nelson would never leave his wife and his other daughters, and she had prided herself on asking him for nothing. But Nelson hadn’t been able to leave the situation alone, had wanted to give Ruth money, had wanted to be part of Kate’s life. He had even insisted that Ruth have the baby christened and that he and Michelle should be godparents. But at the christening, Michelle had found out.

Ruth still doesn’t know how it happened, but two days after the short ceremony at a Catholic church, Nelson had turned up on her doorstop, so ashen-faced that for a second she had barely recognised him. Michelle knew that he was Kate’s father. ‘She asked me a straight question and I couldn’t very well lie, could I?’ Ruth had her own opinion on that but she had wisely kept silent. Nelson had admitted everything and he and Michelle had ‘had it out’. They had argued furiously (‘It was terrible, Ruth, we argued for two days. We never argue.’ ‘Really?’) and the upshot was that Nelson had agreed not to see Ruth or Kate again. Ever. ‘It was the only way I could save our marriage. I’m sorry.’ What if they met in the course of work, Ruth had asked, stony-faced. ‘She accepts that that might happen, of course.’ Nelson had wanted to make a ‘financial provision’, to give her money every month, but Ruth had refused. She hadn’t realised how far Nelson would go to save his marriage. Or how much it would hurt.

Seeing Nelson at the museum had been worse, far worse, than seeing poor Neil Topham’s body curled up beside the bishop’s coffin. Her feelings for Nelson are so complicated that she has long since stopped trying to make sense of them. As soon as she sees him she always feels, in quick succession: irritation (he’s the bossiest person she knows), respect (he’s very good at his job), pleasure (he makes her laugh), and undeniable attraction. Does she love him? She has stopped asking herself this question too. She knows that she never wants to live with a man again. Ten years ago, when Peter moved out, she remembers the way the house itself seemed to sigh with relief. It was just Ruth and the cats and the wild skyline, alone at last. And now it’s just Ruth and Kate and Flint. But it had been nice having Nelson around. He may be a male chauvinist pig but he’s quite useful in a crisis.

Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bonnie to me…

She has reached the Saltmarsh. It is dark now but she can hear the sea sighing in the distance. The road is raised up over the flat marshland, and at times like this it feels as if you are arriving at the end of the world. She may have left the plastic ghouls and miniature witches behind but this is the real thing. The dark, the unknown. Ruth has known real terror on the Saltmarsh but still she loves it. Her cottage is one of three but one is empty and the other is a holiday home, seldom occupied. It’s a lonely place but, on the whole, Ruth enjoys the solitude. So, when she parks outside her house and the security light (installed two years ago by Nelson) illuminates the Sold sign on the house next door, she feels a familiar irritation, almost anger. The house has been bought for rental, she knows, and any day now she’ll have some trendy couple leaning over the fence and inviting her round for sushi, or some bearded loner who wants to show her his dried seaweed collection. Or some-. Stop, she tells herself, unlocking the door and carrying Kate inside. It may well be a new soul mate, or someone with children the right age to play with Kate, but the truth is that Ruth doesn’t really want any new friends. She has enough trouble with the ones she’s got.

Nelson drives to the hospital in a similarly uncomfortable state of mind. Seeing Ruth again had been as bad as he had imagined it would be. And when she mentioned Katie! Nelson’s feelings for Ruth are so tied up with guilt and fear that he finds them impossible to untangle. His feelings for Katie, on the other hand, are crystal clear. He loves her, the baby he has only held three times in his life, and he wants to be her father. But that’s impossible.